I vividly recall the summer that I nagged my mother endlessly to let me have a lemonade stand. I know I was under 8 years old, but I don’t recall exactly how old. We lived in a safe neighborhood where people looked out for each other and anyone’s children. Because everyone was poor or working…
As I write about apologies this week, I am including two posts on not apologizing. The first, Sweet Madeleine, appeared yesterday when I commented on former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who wrote an op-ed piece in the NY Times that has been reported as an apology for her assigning to a special place in…
To say that I am not an auditory learner is an understatement. I want a map. I am the guy who needs the visuals. I like the diagram that illustrates the process way more than the verbal directions. It isn’t that I can’t learn by listening. There are just funny results at times when I…
A couple of weeks ago I titled a blog post Sorry, Not Sorry and the statistics for readership shot up. I am not sure it was the title that caused the spike or my fetching photographs or pithy comments, but I will hazard a guess that at least a few readers were snagged by the…
This week I have been writing about love in anticipation of Valentine’s Day. I have written about three facets of love as these apply to interpersonal relationships and civic relationships, namely intimacy, passion, and commitment. The particular model of love that I ascribe to differs from the Greeks, Romans, St. Paul of Tarsus, or Santa.…
The pledge taken in marriage is one of the more visible statements of relationship commitment in western culture. Civic pledges, like oaths of offices and the Pledge of Allegiance, are similarly statements of our commitment. We have witnessed the recitation of these promises scores of times, perhaps thousands, by the time we are in high…
Each year I teach about love in a psychology class at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. Each semester there are at least a few students who question why I am teaching this content in a course about the psychology of LGBT people. They seem to echo Tina Turner: What’s love got to do with…
As I write about love this week, I went online for all things related to it. What better place to start a search like this than celebrity wedding vows. This one — certainly NOT my favorite — still kept snagging my attention: I vow to keep the spare toilet paper in the bathroom instead of…
I have always loved me some Tina Turner. But when Ms. Turner soulfully sings What’s love got to do with it, I confess that she loses me when she asks, “What’s love but a second-hand emotion?” I think that love might be the life of a community and fear might be its death. This week…
My blog posts are sometimes started days before they are scheduled for online publication. This week as I am writing in concert with my friend Tom whose posts appear at One Whole Life, my writing is particularly organized. We have quite consciously outlined what we will include in each day’s posts, not so much to…
Creating Community for Everyone 